For those familiar with the English educational calendar this is a fraught time for the Ward family with Alex doing A-levels and Theo doing his GCSE’s. Just an aside I preferred the term O-levels and am constantly reminded of J. K. Rowling’s Ordinary and Advanced Level Wizarding. As a parent I can now add the sense that I over-pressured my sons academically, as well as being too lax with them academically to my endemic sense of not being present enough as a Father. Most of all I wonder if they are suffering from anxiety and more importantly how would I know what that is.
My experience as a teenager was that everyone was a bit worried about exams except the significant minority who knew they weren’t going to do well and already had other plans for their life. A few ‘highly strung’ individuals were very worried and would experience physical symptoms before exams or even be unable to take them. Our feelings towards those few were a mixture of sympathy and gentle contempt in the same sort way that we felt toward people who couldn’t finish the School steeplechase. I probably wasn’t a very nice or sensitive adolescent – but there didn’t seem to much demand for that kind of thing.
Nowadays we constantly ask our children about anxiety and it seems to be a topic of their peer group discussions and I feel like one of those people who missed an earlier lesson and hasn’t the courage to say that I am not sure what everyone is talking about. I do wonder if by naming this condition we have turned a few isolated cases into an epidemic, children are nothing if not opportunistic and for any of us the option to manage expectations with something that sounds like a clinical condition would be hard to resist. What are the incentives for saying you don’t feel anxiety? At my most extreme I would define an exam as the ability to do something arbitrary but quite difficult at a given time and in a given place under conditions of stress, the reasons for failing to deliver are not limited to poor memory or insufficient academic understanding but include what soccer fans describe as ‘big match temperament’. We expect soldiers only a little older to face fire, junior doctors to work long hours and save lives, so many people need to do things for other people whatever their own internal state.
And I am not a heartless, stiff upper-lipped bastard, at least I want to think I am not. I have seen how stress and fear can cause people to lose confidence and understate their ability within my own family and in my own life. I have nothing against good coping strategies, meditation, good sleep and supportive parents even special circumstance for taking exams. It is just there are big things on the horizon, from global warming to political extremism to technological change. We may or may not be nervous about them, we probably should be, but there are no parents or exam boards or outside authorities to save us. We all are going to have just cope, with our lives and with taking care of this planet.
6moreSleeps 